Daily Digest 2/10 - Battling College Costs, Plundering The Planet

Economy

"I don't think there's an example in American history that has the poverty level that Camden has," said Alan Berube, deputy director at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program in Washington. "It's a question of whether Camden can function again."

Plenty of influential people assume that teenagers can ask parents for loans if all else fails, as Mitt Romney suggested during the 2012 presidential campaign. Others recall working their way through college themselves, including Representative Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina who heads a House subcommittee on higher education and work force training. “I spent seven years getting my undergraduate degree and didn’t borrow a dime of money,” she once said at a subcommittee meeting, adding that she was bewildered, given her own experience, by tales of woe she had heard from people with $80,000 in debt.

First, many economists, especially conservative ones, have a libertarian streak. Ever since Adam Smith taught us about the wonders of free markets and the magic of the invisible hand, we have been loath to prohibit mutually advantageous trades between consenting adults. If an American farmer wants to hire a worker to pick fruits and vegetables, the fact that the worker happens to have been born in Mexico does not seem a compelling reason to stop the transaction.

Energy

The grey slab has all the subtlety of a giant tombstone. “It has been a depressing derelict standing there for years now,” says Wayne Prins, provincial director for the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC), representing vast numbers of oil sands workers, who once saw Voyageur as the next ticket on the endless train of long-term prosperous employment.

Environment

The storm system that walloped New England, dumping more than three feet of snow in some areas and leaving 19 inches in this town about 40 miles north of Boston, had also aggravated the sea, placing much of New England’s east coast under a coastal flood warning and inundating some low-lying areas from Hampton, N.H., down to Cape Cod.

This weeks guest is Ugo Bardi, Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence. He specialises in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, or ASPO, is the president ASPO Italy, and a contributor to the Oil Drum, the best energy blog on the web. He is the author of several books, including "The Limits to Growth Revisited”, his upcoming book "Plundering The Planet", and even finds time to write his own excellent blog, Cassandra’s Legacy. Our discussion covers the role of volcano's, Georg Bauer, the father of mining, space aliens, and climate change./p>

Gold & Silver

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"When Vladimir Putin says the U.S. is endangering the global economy by abusing its dollar monopoly, he’s not just talking. He’s betting on it.

Not only has Putin made Russia the world’s largest oil producer, he’s also made it the biggest gold buyer. His central bank has added 570 metric tons of the metal in the past decade, a quarter more than runner-up China, according to IMF data compiled by Bloomberg. The added gold is also almost triple the weight of the Statue of Liberty.
“The more gold a country has, the more sovereignty it will have if there’s a cataclysm with the dollar, the euro, the pound or any other reserve currency,” Evgeny Fedorov, a lawmaker for Putin’s United Russia party in the lower house of parliament, said in a telephone interview in Moscow.

Gold, coveted by Russian rulers including Tsar Nicholas II and the Bolshevik leader whose forces assassinated him, Vladimir Lenin, has soared almost 400 percent in the period of Putin’s purchases. Central banks around the world have printed money to escape the global financial crisis, sapping investor appetite for dollars and euros and setting off a scramble for safety. "

A few questions: what kind of temperatures were you dealing with in your neck of the woods? What are your average winter temperatures? What is the average estimate of when you are able to start working your soil in prep for planting? I am curious about your climate.

Thanks, and glad you made it through the storm without any difficulties.

We had our big snow a couple weeks ago in the form of a lake effect "event." Unfortunately my tractor with snow blower attachment were in the shop, so we became reacquainted with shovels. It's funny how one gets into physical shape quickly when forced to perform the task almost continuously over the course of a week or so. You obviously experienced that at your place.

As my neighbor called it, just a dusting! All kidding aside, it was HUGE! 22 inches for me. It's just chaos all across CT right now...Many roads remain unplowed, 3 full days after the storm. The cities are a disaster - there's just no place to put the snow...guess they should not have designed cities with people living on top of each other...but I digress. I went on the highway this morning and all of a sudden the lane I was on would end with a snowbank. Very surreal. Luckily we had no snow on the ground before the storm.

I do need to figure out a place to store firewood indoors or covered somehow - the whipping winds covered my firewood with snow underneath my covered front door. I'm not crazy about storing firewood in my house because of the bugs - my woodpile looks like a sawmill with all the termites and ants at work.

As my neighbor called it, just a dusting! All kidding aside, it was HUGE! 22 inches for me. It's just chaos all across CT right now...Many roads remain unplowed, 3 full days after the storm. The cities are a disaster - there's just no place to put the snow...guess they should not have designed cities with people living on top of each other...but I digress. I went on the highway this morning and all of a sudden the lane I was on would end with a snowbank. Very surreal. Luckily we had no snow on the ground before the storm.

I do need to figure out a place to store firewood indoors or covered somehow - the whipping winds covered my firewood with snow underneath my covered front door. I'm not crazy about storing firewood in my house because of the bugs - my woodpile looks like a sawmill with all the termites and ants at work.

I think we are at about the same latitude and I'm very doubtful that you get more snow than I. After I cut and split wood it is stored under a fairly large lean-to for at least a year. In the late fall I move almost a winter worth of the aged wood to my front porch which is also covered. The wood there typically gets covered with windblown snow several times through the winter, but I just sweep most of it off with a whisk broom or regular broom. I bring a day or two worth of wood into the house and it dries out just fine after a couple hours. I get ants in the logs that are outside before I cut them up, but have no problems with bugs after the cut and split wood is sheltered and dried for a bit.

I've seen numerous examples of people framing a small shelter and using plywood or tarps for sides and roof that seem to work out quite well for significant amounts of wood. If you don't have room to store wood for a year and don't want to buy cured wood, consider ash. It dries very quickly (a couple months after cutting and splitting). Some people say it doesn't require any drying, but I wouldn't trust that. The problem with ash is the emerald ash borer continues to destroy all ash in its path, so future stocks become more limited every year.